Pennies on Edges

Pick a number,

     Any number

     Between one and two.

Either headless,

     Or tailless too,

     The choice is yours, see:

You can’t be wrong,

     You just can’t.

     Wrong is not an option.

The Party

If there was ever a time when you loved me
I never knew it.

Instead, with abundant caution
     I loved us (both).
The time we spent, the things we did
     Passed, without.
What we made was never real,
     Artifice.

What we made was never real,
     Just shadows,
          Dancing on the wall
          Behind a loveless flame.

The Telephone Game

That night, the night when Nietzsche slithered out of his throne,

     Scooted nearer and squatted down right next to me.

That night, the night when we formed an elliptical circle of chairs,

     (Was it Fanny Mendelssohn’s or at Rue de Berri?).

That night, the night when Nietzsche used his hand to cone the words

     As he leaned over and whispered them into my ear.

That night, the night when Nietzsche’s fetid breath warmed my neck,

     And his nostrils sat upon the floppy lobe
    
     beneath my thinning hair.

That night, the night when Nietzsche’s wine-soaked,

     spittle-covered tongue

     Lisped between his rotted teeth and swelled around his

     yellowed gums.

That night, the night when Nietzsche’s last-supped transubstantiated

     wafer crumbled,

     He slurred the Death of God and set me

          free to mourn.

What of this secret, whispered in this circle-ish salon game—

     What of this truth, passed on from lip to ear over epochs.

What of this secret, guarded in talumud, apocrypha, in altern

     scriptures of man—

     What of this truth brought far, both freeing from and invoking fear.

What of this secret, first over apple contemplated and making nude—

     What of this truth: Yahweh and Dionysis and Apollo dead alike.

What of this secret, bound in enlightened madness, carried over

     atomic wind—

     What of this truth, planted on the crucifixion of man’s own son.

What of this secret, that Paul and Augustine and Kant and Maimonides

     hid and sought—

     What of this truth, that guided armies slaying in its name.

What of this secret, this mournful ambitious secret, this trial—

     What of this truth, this hollow, hymned, and ringing truth

    (Whilst Wagner in the background hummed)—

          Passed on first from Christ himself,

          (Or Simon Peter or John the Baptizer or Abraham?)

          A secret truth rejected:

               and who is left to tell

               in this close-looped, unfulfilled orbit?